Microsoft Azure Stack is an extension of Azure – bringing the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment and enabling the only hybrid cloud that allows you to build and deploy hybrid apps anywhere. We bring together the best of the edge and cloud to deliver Azure services anywhere in your environment.

Empowering digital transformation together at Red Hat Summit

Today we’re wrapping up an amazing week at Red Hat Summit. We’re proud to, once again, sponsor and participate in a forum that brings together customers, partners and communities who are passionate about open source in the enterprise.

With over 40% of enterprise decision makers saying that increasing open source usage is a high or critical priority to their departments, there’s little doubt that open source plays an important role in the enterprise digital transformation. And we’re seeing this momentum in the cloud, with 1 in 3 VMs in Microsoft Azure running Linux, growing at 1.4x the rate of Windows VMs.

Yet a successful cloud strategy is not just about agility and speed, something IT knows well. In Red Hat’s Global Customer Tech Outlook survey for 2017, security, compliance, management and hybrid cloud strategy closely follow infrastructure as top funding priorities for the year, with roughly half of the CIOs naming them a top priority.

Our partnership with Red Hat, announced a year and a half ago, brings more choice to hybrid cloud deployments in a secure, manageable and well-supported way, and drives agility across capabilities such as unified development and DevOps, integrated management, common identity and a consistent data platform.

Helping our customers transform in the cloud

Whether a customer is running a scale-out Red Hat Enterprise Linux cluster, using JBoss Middleware for an IoT solution or leveraging integrated support for OpenShift Container Platform, our partnership meets customers wherever they are in their cloud journey, and Microsoft is the only cloud provider that delivers consistency across on-premises and the public cloud while providing access to the rich Azure ecosystem.

This flexibility delivers unprecedented capacity and agility to organizations of all kinds and sizes. Joining me on stage today in my closing keynote, Terrance Snyder, Director of Media Platform Solutions at Catalina Marketing will share how they use open source, and where Microsoft and Red Hat fit. And there are many more great customer scenarios where Red Hat solutions in Azure are fueling digital transformation.

For example, Nielsen uses Red Hat Ansible with Azure to create and configure application resources from scratch in minutes, saving days of effort per environment. And TMB Bank uses Azure to fuel their digital transformation, choosing Microsoft for their Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads thanks to its world-class security and compliance standards.

At Red Hat Summit, Volvo shared how they use OpenShift Container Plaform in Azure for Java production applications, using Ansible to automate deployments across locations.

Pacifico Seguros, a Peruvian insurance company, uses Red Hat solutions in Azure such as JBoss Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to train agents, deploying a full core environment to Azure, including their P&C back-end.

In Japan, partner Visionarts helped Sony Corporation move a customer-facing function of the VAIO business to Azure. Visionarts is using Azure Log Analytics and Azure Security Center extensively for their Red Hat solutions, aggregating management tasks with no need to login and providing proactive response to vulnerabilities.

The road ahead

One of the most exciting aspects of the Red Hat / Microsoft partnership is our integrated support, including co-located resources. Richard Hum, studio head at Throwback Entertainment, told us that his team was “surprised that Red Hat open source and Azure support resided in the same office” In my keynote, I’ll share more about the individuals that make this partnership successful, and our joint learnings.

Over the last 18 months, we’ve brought innovation to both portfolios, from .NET Core on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Red Hat solutions in Azure including OpenShift Container Platform and JBoss Middleware. Later today, Jim Zimmerman from Microsoft and Steve Pousty from Red Hat will demo some of the new features for developers that we’ve been working on over the last 18 months, including SQL Server, .NET Core and Windows Server plus OpenShift in Azure.

And today, as part of our enduring partnership that spans joint engineering, security and support efforts, Microsoft and Red Hat are announcing our plans to offer SQL Server 2017 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, featuring high availability, immediately upon the SQL Server GA later this year. We’ll continue working with Red Hat on high value scenarios for our joint customers in the enterprise such as hybrid and container based solutions.

Finally, I’d like to invite you to learn more about Red Hat in Azure at our Microsoft Technology Centers where we’re rolling out the latest technical demos and learnings from customers and partners. If you want to get started with OpenShift in Azure, check the newly released Test Drive experience. And if you are not attending the Red Hat Summit, you can watch the keynote online and follow our event highlights on Twitter!